No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Some Thoughts on Translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
The history of classical scholarship bears the traces of many a violent battle over the theory and practice of translation. It is not surprising therefore that today, when translations are in more common use than ever before, not only as aids to reading the original but even as sole texts for pupils in schools and universities lacking the classical languages, their function and quality should be subjects of considerable discussion and disagreement. The demand is greater than ever, and a Penguin version of Homer can become a best-seller; but it is also harder than ever to satisfy oneself that the translation one has recommended is not misleading students nurtured in a culture and attuned to an idiom so different from those of the Graeco-Roman world. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the provision of good translations is a matter no longer of theoretical discussion but of immediate practical importance, if our students are to have the remotest possibility of reaching understanding of what classical writers were trying to say.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Classical Association 1974
References
page 112 note 1 ‘Linguistics and Literature’ in Linguistics at Large, ed. Minnis, N. (St. Albans 1973) 130 f.Google Scholar
page 112 note 2 On Translating Poetry (Abingdon, 1970), 3.Google Scholar
page 112 note 3 Mason, H. A., To Homer through Pope (London, 1972), 1.Google Scholar
page 113 note 1 Cf. the judgement of the nineteenth-century scholar, Moritz Haupt: ‘Never translate: translation is the death of understanding.’
page 113 note 2 Austin, R. G., Some English Translations of Virgil (Liverpool, 1956), 21.Google Scholar
page 114 note 1 See, e.g., Robinson, I., The Survival of English (Cambridge, 1973), 22 ff.Google Scholar
page 114 note 2 Postgate, J. P., Translations and Translators (London, 1922), 3.Google Scholar
page 115 note 1 742–51
page 115 note 2 1224–38.
page 115 note 3 806–16.
page 117 note 1 Virgil, , Aeneid i. 461–2.Google Scholar
page 117 note 2 Vergil, The Aeneid (New York, 1961), 19.Google Scholar
page 118 note 1 Wright, D., Beowulf (Harmondsworth, 1957), 21 ff.Google Scholar
page 118 note 2 Bridges, R., Ibant Obscuri, 40Google Scholar; I owe the reference to Higham, T. F. and Bowra, C. M., The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (Oxford, 1938), xxxiii.Google Scholar
page 119 note 1 Mackail, J. W., The Aeneid of Virgil (London, 1885)Google Scholar; Jackson, J., Virgil (Oxford, 1908)Google Scholar; Knight, W. F. Jackson, Virgil, The Aeneid (Harmondsworth, 1956).Google Scholar
page 121 note 1 Op. cit. xcvi.
page 121 note 2 Op. cit. 194f.
page 122 note 1 Dante, The Divine Comedy (Harmondsworth, 1949), i. 56.Google Scholar
page 122 note 2 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth, 1951), 17.Google Scholar
page 122 note 3 Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires (Harmondsworth, 1967), 60.Google Scholar
page 123 note 1 Virgil, Aeneid I, edited by Austin, R. G. (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar
page 124 note 1 Virgil, Aeneid 1–6, edited by Williams, R. D. (London, 1972).Google Scholar
page 124 note 2 Stanley, K., ‘Irony and Interpretation in Aeneid i. 462’, AJP lxxxvi (1965), 267–77.Google Scholar
page 124 note 3 Virgil (London, 1969), 35, 115, 134, and 148 respectively.Google Scholar
page 125 note 1 May, J. Lewis, ‘Concerning Translation’, The Edinburgh Review (01 1927), 117—another reference which I owe to T. F. Higham.Google Scholar
page 126 note 1 Greek Poetry for Everyman (London, 1951), xv f.Google Scholar
page 126 note 2 For a similar view see Dexter, N. C., ‘The Changing Pattern of Examinations’, Latin Teaching xxxv. 1 (1973), 8 ff.Google Scholar, and especially the comment that ‘some teachers have assumed that new ideas must necessarily replace old ideas, instead of implementing and complementing them’.
page 126 note 3 Higham's brief remarks on Cory have been developed in a comparison of his Heraclitus with versions of the same poem by two twentieth-century Welsh poets (Davies, Ceri, ‘Heracleitos: Tri Fersiwn’, Y Traethodydd cxxvii [1972], 14ff.).Google Scholar
page 126 note 4 I cannot trace my source for this anecdote nor am I sure that Charlesworth was not telling it of a clergyman friend of his.
page 127 note 1 The complete version of this paper was delivered as a lecture to a one-day school on Classical Literature in Translation held at the University of Birmingham in December, 1973.